Fantasy – Page 5 – Movie Meister Reviews

January 10, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

LOCKE & KEY: SEASON 1 (2020) – Great For Locke Down!

NOTE: Here is my review from Soda & Telepaths that was posted back on April 15th, 2020.

In 2008 IDW Publishing released the first issue of Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez. The book gained a cult following pretty quickly and was actually optioned to be a TV series back in 2011. They even shot a pilot for Fox TV which would’ve starred, not kidding, Jesse McCartney AKA that kid who sang Beautiful Soul (I don’t know why this amuses me, I thought I’d share that info anyway).

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January 9, 2022 leebutler Review

October Faction: Season 1 (2020) – Thinking of watching it? Don’t.

NOTE: Here is my review from Soda & Telepaths that was posted back on April 1st, 2020.

In 2015, IDW Publishing released the first volume of The October Faction, a series that revolved around retired monster-hunter Frederick Allen and his family. Netflix, always hungry for content, scooped up the rights for this comic and decided to make it into a Netflix original series… a series that they dropped on the 23rd of January and I suspect you heard nothing else about it because it didn’t catch anyone’s attention. Turns out there’s a reason for that… It’s genuinely one of the worst shows on Netflix.

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December 17, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) – Home Free

Released: 16th December
Seen: 16th December

As usual, Marvel films are hard to review because saying anything about the plot is enough to have pitchforks and torches raised by an angry mob wanting to set fire to the spoiler who spoiled the movie for them so we’re going to mix up my normal order. I’ll do two paragraph of this review as my general overall thoughts about the movie, then I’ll pop the trailer in and that’s when I will start talking about plot stuff.

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November 17, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021) – Half The Battle

Released: 22nd July
Seen: 14th November

The G.I. Joe film franchise is honestly a little baffling, to say the least. The first two films were critical duds, barely made back their money at the domestic box office, they don’t even seem to be the sort of films that the critics hated but audiences loved. It’s a franchise that doesn’t make a buttload of money, get critical praise or have a cult following so I don’t know why it still exists… but for some reason they made a third movie around the origins of the Snake Eyes character (because as X-Men will confirm, it’s always a good idea to just make an origins movie) and… well, at least Henry Golding’s got some good footage for his reel but not sure what else there is.

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November 3, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Bingo Hell (2021) – Bingo Heck

Released: 1st October
Seen: 1st November

In October of last year, Blumhouse films released 4 movies direct to Prime Video as part of a series titled “Welcome To The Blumhouse”. The films (The Lie, Black Box, Evil Eye and Nocturne) may not have been great but they all displayed a certain amount of promise, introduced some new talent and all broke from tradition by having a diverse cast that wasn’t the typical set of teenage dirtbags that litter the genre like so many soon-to-be-carcasses. Clearly that little experiment did pretty well because this year they’re back with 4 more films and today we’re going to look at Bingo Hell, because evil killer bingo is right up my alley.

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October 27, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) – Pure Fun

Released: 2nd September
Seen: 27th October

The last time I saw an MCU film in the cinemas was 1st of July 2019, the film in question being Spider-man: Far From Home. It’s so weird to think that it’s been so long since there’s been an MCU film in a cinema, if you’d told me after seeing that film that we would’ve gone a little over 2 years without getting a MCU film in the cinema near me I would’ve called you insane. That’s been our weird little reality though, the franchise that effectively owned the box office took a couple of years off because they had no choice.

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September 5, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Cinderella (2021) – More Like Sinderella

Released: 3rd September
Seen: 4th September

The story of Cinderella has been adapted countless times in multiple forms. From the legendary Disney animated classic of 1950 to the millennial favourite 1997 version that starred Whitney Houston and Brandi, to the Disney Live-Action version from 2015, there have been so many attempts made at this simple story that it feels weird to go five years without someone taking a shot at it.

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June 20, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Luca (2021) – Looka At This, It’s Cute (and a little bit gay)

Released: 18th June
Seen: 18th June

With all the films that are going to Disney’s premier service lately I’ve noticed a weird pattern regarding the films that they don’t throw a surcharge on the second it pops up… namely that they’ve been, largely, kind of bad. Sure there’s exceptions like Soul or Onward, but other films like Magic Camp, Stargirl and Artemis Fowl (a film that, no joke, didn’t pop up on their site’s list of original films when I went to look before writing this). Basically if a film skips cinemas and just pops up on Disney Plus I’m going to be going in with some trepidation… and then they just throw something like Luca up there and I wonder if they even know when they have a good thing on their hands.

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June 19, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Wish Dragon (2021) – A Charming Little Wish

Released: 11th June
Seen: 16th June

So earlier this year, Disney released the film Raya and the Last Dragon. It was a pretty great film as a lot of Disney’s animated fare tends to be but there was this weird thing going around where people wrote off its box office as a failure because it only made 130 million worldwide on a 100 million budget. For some reason this is a thing that keeps coming up this year where films are having their box offices judged based on pre-pandemic expectations, as though we’re completely through the wilderness. Spoilers, we’re not. Anyway I bring this up because I wonder if the supposed failure of Raya and the Last Dragon led to today’s film Wish Dragon not getting as much attention as it deserves which is a shame because Wish Dragon is charming.

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June 16, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Oxygen (2021) – Breathe In The Goodness

Released: 12th May
Seen: 15th June

Alexandre Aja is a fascinating director. He first really came to prominence with his film Haute Tension, part of an era of horror cinema known as “New French Extremity” which, very basically, means French films that really messed with people in the early 2000’s. He would go on to make the Hills Have Eyes remake (one of the few good 2000’s horror remakes), Piranha 3D (another one of the few good 2010’s horror remakes) and Crawl (2019 Best Film honorable mention). His films have this weird pattern of somehow getting less extreme the longer he works, which is a fascinating projection for one of the founding members of the New French Extremity movement. It fits that pattern then that Oxygen might be his most subdued film yet, but it’s still really damn good.

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